United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit hears appeals from the federal district courts of Connecticut, New York and Vermont.¹ Its judges sit in the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Foley Square in New York City.²

Guaranty Trust, 1938

On April 25, 1938 the Supreme Court decided Guaranty Trust Co. of New York v. United States, 304 U.S. 126, a suit by the United States as assignee of Russian Soviet claims against Guaranty Trust Company of New York. The Second Circuit had reversed the trial court's judgment, and the Supreme Court reversed the Second Circuit.³

The Rosenberg appeal and Roy Cohn

On February 25, 1952 the court decided United States v. Rosenberg, the appeal from the convictions of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg. The opinion, written by Judge Jerome Frank, states that because two of the defendants faced death if the judgments stood, the court had "scrutinized the record with extraordinary care."⁴ On the government's side Myles J. Lane appeared for the United States, with Roy Cohn, James B. Kilsheimer and Stanley D. Robinson listed as "of counsel."⁵

Cohn returned to the court in 1969 as a petitioner. On September 17, 1969 a per curiam order denied his petition for a writ of mandamus directing Inzer B. Wyatt, a judge of the Southern District of New York, to adjourn Cohn's trial, then set for September 23, 1969, on charges of conspiracy, bribery and extortion. The petition argued that pretrial publicity, including a Life article published September 1 and 2, 1969, made an impartial jury impossible. The order reads: "We deny in open court the Petition of Roy M. Cohn against Judge Inzer B. Wyatt." Assistant United States Attorneys Paul L. Perito and Peter L. Truebner were listed on the government's brief.⁶⁷

The Pentagon Papers injunction

On June 23, 1971 the court, sitting en banc, remanded the government's suit against the New York Times Company to the district court "for further in camera proceedings" to determine, by July 3, 1971, whether specified items "pose such grave and immediate danger to the security of the United States as to warrant their publication being enjoined." The stay remained in effect for those items until disposition. The reporter prints a separate statement by Judges Irving R. Kaufman, Wilfred Feinberg and James L. Oakes that they dissent and "would vacate the stay and affirm the judgment of the Court below."⁸ The suit concerned the classified study that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

The Hunt suit against Mobil

In January 1977 the court decided Hunt v. Mobil Oil Corp., in which Nelson Bunker Hunt was among the plaintiff appellants suing Mobil Oil and other defendants.⁹ The complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York on March 3, 1975 and sought treble damages under the antitrust laws. The panel held that the motion to dismiss was correctly decided, and it affirmed the judgment of the district court, which had dismissed before trial, on the basis of the act of state doctrine, the third antitrust claim of the plaintiffs' complaint.

IBM and the Baxter conflict, 1982

The Justice Department had sued IBM under section 2 of the Sherman Act on January 17, 1969.¹⁰ On January 8, 1982 the parties filed a stipulation of dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(ii), signed for the government by Assistant Attorney General William F. Baxter. The stipulation recites that the Antitrust Division had completed a review of the case and had concluded that the case "is without merit and should be dismissed."¹⁰

Judge David N. Edelstein of the Southern District of New York initially gave no indication that he questioned the effectiveness of the stipulation. On January 26, 1982 he published an article in the Wall Street Journal calling for the decision to "be scrutinized carefully," and on March 2 he placed in the record letters indicating that Baxter had served as a consultant to IBM during the early stages of a private antitrust suit brought by Memorex.¹¹ Edelstein then ruled that whether the Tunney Act applied to the stipulation was a jurisdictional question for the court to decide.

On August 13, 1982 a panel of Judges Thomas J. Meskill, Jon O. Newman and Amalya L. Kearse held that "a writ of mandamus shall issue directing Judge Edelstein to cease any further inquiry with respect to the conflict of interest claim." The panel said it expressed "no view as to the merits of that claim." It did not expedite its review of whether mandamus should also issue on the Tunney Act question, because no urgency attended that aspect of the petition.¹²

Letelier v. Republic of Chile, 1984

The families of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, who were killed by a car bomb in Washington in September 1976, obtained a default judgment of more than five million dollars against the Republic of Chile in the District of Columbia, and then sought to execute on the New York assets of the state airline, LAN Chile. Judge Morris Lasker of the Southern District of New York ordered execution. On November 20, 1984 the Second Circuit reversed in an opinion by Judge Richard J. Cardamone, which opens: "How one wishes to decide a case comes lightly to mind, on a wing; but often how one must decide it comes arduously, weighed down by somber thought. To rule otherwise here would only illustrate once again that hard cases make bad law."¹³

The opinion recites the facts that the district court had found, in part through evidentiary sanctions for Chile's default: that from January 1975 through January 1979 LAN's assets and facilities were under the direct control of Chile, and that Chile used LAN's facilities and personnel to transport Michael Townley between Chile and the United States, to transport explosives on several occasions, to assist with currency transactions paying the co-conspirators, to provide a meeting place for them, and to arrange for Townley to leave the United States under an alias after the assassination. The panel held that these facts were not the abuse of the corporate form that would overcome the presumption of LAN's separate status under First National City Bank v. Banco Para El Comercio Exterior de Cuba, and wrote that they "simply demonstrate that Michael Townley was able to enlist the cooperation of certain LAN pilots and officials with whom he had a pre-existing social relationship in pursuing his sinister goal." It also held that the property sought was not used for the commercial activity in which the claim arose, and it reversed the orders and dismissed the supplementary proceedings.¹⁴

The Blauer estate and the Army mescaline tests

On July 31, 1986 the court decided Barrett v. United States, an appeal in the suit brought by the estate of Harold Blauer against the United States and individual defendants, among them the estate of Amedeo Marazzi, whom the opinion describes as Dr. Marazzi "of the Chemical Corps." The opinion recites the estate's allegation that the drug was given "for diagnostic purposes to Mr. Blauer," and that, according to the estate, Paul Hoch was "well aware" that the compound was a new one "not being administered for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes."¹⁵ The opinion describes Hoch as the New York State Psychiatric Institute medical official in charge of administering the compound, and states that the mescaline derivative "had been supplied by the United States Army Chemical Corps pursuant to contracts between its procurement agency and NYSPI."¹⁵

According to records relied on by the estate, a conference of federal counsel and medical personnel met in early July 1954, at which Marazzi and Hoch expressed apprehension about anticipated malpractice claims.¹⁶

Iran arms prosecutions, 1987 and 1988

On December 3, 1987 the court affirmed the convictions of Arif Durrani under the Arms Export Control Act. Judge Irving R. Kaufman wrote for a panel with Judges Lawrence W. Pierce and Roger J. Miner. The opinion opens by describing the "still simmering national scandal of high government officials engaged in the covert shipment of arms to Iran" and records that Durrani, accused of shipping Hawk missile parts to Iran without a license, "candidly admits that he sold arms to Iran, but claims to have been a cog in the wheel turned by Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter." Alan Dershowitz argued the appeal for Durrani, with Nathan Z. Dershowitz and Victoria B. Eiger on the brief. Holly B. Fitzsimmons, an Assistant United States Attorney, appeared for the government.¹⁷

The opinion recites Durrani's trial account. He described a 1985 encounter with Rahim Malekzedeh, procurement chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who told him that Iran was dealing with a number of Americans and Israelis including Oliver North, the CIA officer George Cave and the Israeli official Amiram Nir. In April 1986 in Portugal a former Iranian intelligence official, George Hassan, told him that he was working with Richard Secord and Albert Hakim on the American shipment of parts to Iran. Durrani said that in September 1986 an unidentified staff member of the National Security Council in Lisbon related the parts to a deal to free American hostages in Lebanon, and that at a meeting in London on October 1, 1986 North assured him "not to worry about the paperwork," because President Ronald Reagan would shortly authorize arms shipments to Iran. The government presented evidence that his associate Pires paid Durrani more than 800,000 dollars between June and October 1986.¹⁸ The district court had quashed a broad subpoena for classified Iran-contra documents but gave Durrani a list of Hawk parts that the Iranians had handed to Cave in March 1986. It excluded as hearsay the Tower Commission report and two memoranda from North to John Poindexter, one of April 16, 1986 and one of September 8, 1986 titled "Next Steps with Iran." The panel held the trial fair and affirmed the conviction "on all counts."¹⁹

On April 7, 1988 a panel of Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg and Judges John D. Mahoney and Thomas J. Meskill affirmed the dismissal of the wire and mail fraud counts in United States v. Evans. The government alleged that Samuel Evans, general counsel to Adnan Khashoggi, and other defendants planned to sell arms made in or licensed from the United States to Iran by deceiving the government about the buyer. The court's narrative records that the arms "were destined for Cyrus Hashemi, a government agent pretending to be an Iranian buyer."²⁰ The court held that "the right to control future arms sales is not a property right for this purpose."²¹

The Commission case, 1989

On January 31, 1989 the court decided United States v. Salerno, the appeal of defendants prosecuted for the Commission of La Cosa Nostra. The opinion lists the New York City families as the Genovese crime family, the Gambino Crime Family, the Colombo crime family, the Lucchese crime family and the Bonanno crime family, and states that since the late 1970s the Commission had been controlled by the bosses of four of them.²² The opinion describes the Commission as "a nationwide criminal society which operates through local organizations known as 'families.'"²³

Ben-Menashe and the Southern District

The federal case against Ari Ben-Menashe, Richard St. Francis and Joseph O'Toole was tried in the Southern District. The district court's August 1, 1990 memorandum by Judge Louis L. Stanton describes the first count as a conspiracy to sell "American-made C-130 military cargo planes located in Israel to Iran, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act." Joseph O'Toole was also charged in count two with conspiring with two unindicted co-conspirators to sell American-made anti-aircraft missiles located in Israel to an undisclosed country. St. Francis moved to dismiss the indictment as a violation of due process, arguing that the government had targeted him without reason to believe he wanted to commit a crime and had not discouraged his belief that the transaction would be approved at the highest levels of the United States Government; Ben-Menashe joined the motion, and the memorandum cites the Second Circuit's Evans decision as authority that such claims succeed only in "exceedingly rare" instances. Baruch Weiss, an Assistant United States Attorney, appeared for the government and Thomas F.X. Dunn for Ben-Menashe.²⁴

A federal jury found Ben-Menashe and St. Francis not guilty on November 28, 1990. At the six-week trial Dunn contended that his client was a former intelligence operative who represented Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in an attempted arms-for-hostages deal in 1988, and Weiss said Ben-Menashe was merely a translator for Israeli military intelligence from 1977 to 1987.²⁵

The Judicial Council complaint against Blackshear, 1991

Cornelius Blackshear, a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York, gave testimony in the INSLAW litigation and later recanted part of it. The bankruptcy judge who heard the matter, George Francis Bason, Jr., accepted Blackshear's original testimony and found the recantation to be the result of an honest mistake. On January 2, 1991 Bason filed a complaint under 28 U.S.C. § 372(c) with the Judicial Council of the Second Circuit, stating that he had "regretfully concluded that Judge Blackshear recanted not because of an honest mistake but because he made a conscious choice to testify falsely."²⁶²⁷

Robert Tappan Morris, 1991

On March 7, 1991 the court affirmed the conviction of Robert Tappan Morris. In the fall of 1988 he was a first-year graduate student in the computer science Ph.D. program at Cornell University, and the conviction under the computer fraud statute concerned the program he released onto the network.²⁸ The panel found sufficient evidence for the jury to conclude that Morris acted "without authorization" and wrote, "We therefore affirm."²⁹ The program became known as the Morris worm. Morris was one of the two men who, with Trevor Blackwell, put in 50,000 dollars each beside Paul Graham's 100,000 dollars to start Y Combinator in 2005.³⁰

The Cali cartel appeal, 1993

United States v. Daccarett, decided in 1993 by a panel that included James L. Oakes, arose from a prosecution connected with the Cali Cartel. The opinion describes the cartel as a Colombian conglomerate, headed by Jose Santacruz Londono, that allegedly imports "approximately 3000 kilograms of cocaine a month into the United States," using bank accounts in the United States, Europe and Central and South America to store and move its proceeds.³¹

The bin Mahfouz suits, 2007 to 2013

Rachel Ehrenfeld, the author of a 2003 book on terrorist financing published by Bonus Books, brought suit in the Southern District of New York against Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi Arabian citizen who had formerly headed the National Commercial Bank. The district court dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction. On June 8, 2007 a panel of Judges Wilfred Feinberg, Pierre N. Leval and José A. Cabranes affirmed on N.Y. C.P.L.R. 302(a)(3) and the denial of jurisdictional discovery, and certified to the New York Court of Appeals the question whether CPLR 302(a)(1) confers jurisdiction over a person who sued a New York resident in a non-United States court when the success of that suit required acts in New York.³²

On March 3, 2008 the same panel affirmed the dismissal in Ehrenfeld v. Mahfouz, relying on the New York Court of Appeals' decision.³³

On April 16, 2013, in the consolidated September 11 attacks litigation captioned In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, a panel of Judges José A. Cabranes and Reena Raggi, with Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York sitting by designation, affirmed the dismissal of claims against Khaled bin Mahfouz and his son Abdulrahman bin Mahfouz for lack of personal jurisdiction. The panel also held that National Commercial Bank lacked the contacts needed for general jurisdiction, and vacated and remanded as to other defendants.³⁴

Citigroup and Judge Rakoff, 2014

On June 4, 2014 a panel of Judges Rosemary S. Pooler, Raymond J. Lohier Jr. and Susan L. Carney decided the appeals of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Citigroup from the November 28, 2011 order of Judge Jed Rakoff refusing to approve a consent decree and setting the case for trial. The SEC's complaint alleged that Citigroup negligently misrepresented its role in structuring and marketing a billion-dollar fund, Class V Funding III, and that it took a short position against assets it had selected, realizing about 160 million dollars. Judge Pooler wrote that the district court "abused its discretion by applying an incorrect legal standard in assessing the consent decree and setting a date for trial." Judge Lohier concurred. Rakoff had appointed pro bono counsel to argue the district court's side of the appeal.³⁵

Rajat Gupta, 2014

On March 25, 2014 a panel of Judges Jon O. Newman, Amalya L. Kearse and Rosemary S. Pooler affirmed the conviction of Rajat Gupta, which arose from Galleon Group trades in Goldman Sachs stock. The opinion's account of the trial says that at 3:15 p.m. on September 23, 2008, "Goldman Sachs held a special meeting of its board of directors" to approve a $5 billion investment in Goldman by Warren Buffett. Gupta, a former managing director of McKinsey & Company, took part by telephone from a conference room at the firm's New York office.³⁶³⁷ Judge Amalya L. Kearse wrote the opinion. Richard C. Tarlowe, an Assistant United States Attorney, appeared for the government, and Seth P. Waxman of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr appeared for Gupta.³⁸

Brown v. Maxwell and the unsealing of the Giuffre record, 2019

The defamation suit filed by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015 was assigned to the Southern District of New York judge Robert W. Sweet. After Maxwell and Giuffre executed a settlement agreement on May 24, 2017, Alan Dershowitz, the writer Michael Cernovich and the Miami Herald, with its reporter Julie K. Brown, sought the sealed record, and Sweet denied the requests. The Second Circuit heard the consolidated appeals, and a panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler and Christopher F. Droney decided them on July 3, 2019 in Brown v. Maxwell.³⁹ Sanford L. Bohrer and Christine N. Walz of Holland & Knight argued for the Herald and Brown, Andrew G. Celli Jr. of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady for Dershowitz, Marc Randazza for Cernovich, Paul G. Cassell and Sigrid S. McCawley of Boies Schiller Flexner for Giuffre, and Ty Gee and Adam Mueller of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman for Maxwell.⁴⁰

The panel held that the district court "failed to conduct the requisite particularized review when ordering the sealing of the materials at issue." It vacated the orders of November 2, 2016, May 3, 2017 and August 27, 2018, ordered "the unsealing of the summary judgment record," and remanded for particularized review of the remaining sealed materials.⁴¹ The panel also wrote that common-law courts should "revitalize this crucial qualification to the litigation privilege," and it quoted the district court's finding that the sealed documents "were neither relied upon by [the District] Court in the rendering of an adjudication, nor necessary to or helpful in resolving a motion."

The decision came three days before the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in New York. On August 9, 2019, the day before Epstein was found dead in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York, the Second Circuit unsealed about 2,000 pages of records from Giuffre v. Maxwell, according to the Inspector General's chronology of the jail.⁴² The Stanford Daily reported in 2026 that an unpublished manuscript made public in 2019, after the Second Circuit ordered related court documents unsealed, refers to the former Stanford psychology professor Stephen Kosslyn.⁴³

FISA Section 702 and United States v. Hasbajrami

On December 18, 2019 the court decided United States v. Hasbajrami, reported at 945 F.3d 641. Agron Hasbajrami was arrested on September 6, 2011 at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight to Turkey, charged with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization, and sentenced to 180 months after pleading guilty. The government disclosed after his sentencing that part of its evidence derived from warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008; Judge John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York permitted him to withdraw his plea, denied his motion to suppress, and accepted a conditional plea.⁴⁴ The case was argued on August 27, 2018 before Judges Gerard Lynch, Susan L. Carney and Christopher F. Droney.⁴⁵

Lynch wrote for the panel that the collection of communications of United States persons incidental to the lawful surveillance of non-United States persons located abroad does not violate the Fourth Amendment. The opinion states that "querying" of the stored data "does have important Fourth Amendment implications" and is a "separate Fourth Amendment event that, in itself, must be reasonable." Because the record, classified and public, did not show whether any querying had occurred or whether it was reasonable, the panel remanded for the district court to determine the facts and whether evidence should be suppressed.⁴⁶ Michael K. Bachrach, Joshua L. Dratel and Steve Zissou appeared for Hasbajrami and Seth D. DuCharme for the government. Patrick Toomey and Ashley Gorski of the American Civil Liberties Union and Mark Rumold and Andrew Crocker of the Electronic Frontier Foundation appeared as amici.⁴⁷ The opinion's footnote records that it was reviewed by appropriate intelligence agencies for redaction, and that the panel met ex parte with representatives of those agencies about modified phrasing and possible declassification.⁴⁸

Giuffre v. Maxwell, the Preska orders and the 2020 summary order

After the Brown remand the case went to Judge Loretta Preska, whom President George W. Bush had nominated to the Second Circuit on September 9, 2008 without a Senate vote.⁴⁹ On July 23, 2020 she ordered the unsealing of materials that included Maxwell's April 2016 deposition. On August 24, 2020 Maxwell's lawyer Jeffrey S. Pagliuca of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman wrote to Judge Alison Nathan in the criminal case that the government had obtained from Giuffre's lawyers, by grand jury subpoena, nearly 90,000 pages of civil discovery still under the protective order, while the Second Circuit and Judge Preska were deciding whether to unseal the same material, and that if the deposition were unsealed "without the benefit of this information," the "cat will be out of the bag."⁵⁰ Laura Menninger of the firm was among the lawyers on Maxwell's lead pretrial motion in the criminal case, to dismiss for breach of the 2007 agreement, which Nathan denied on April 16, 2021.⁵¹

On October 19, 2020 a panel of Judges Cabranes, Pooler and Raggi affirmed Preska's July 23, 2020 order by summary order. Maxwell had argued that the presumption of access to deposition materials was lower than for the summary judgment materials unsealed in Brown. The panel held that the district court "correctly held that the deposition materials are judicial documents to which the presumption of public access attaches," found that it "did not abuse its discretion in rejecting Maxwell's meritless arguments," and denied her motion to consolidate the appeal with her pending criminal appeal, No. 20-3061-cr. David Boies argued for Giuffre and Adam Mueller for Maxwell.⁵²

Halkbank

On October 22, 2021 a panel of Judges Amalya L. Kearse, José A. Cabranes and Joseph Bianco decided the appeal of Turkiye Halk Bankasi A.S., known as Halkbank, from the denial of its motion to dismiss the sanctions indictment. The district judge was Richard M. Berman of the Southern District of New York. The opinion frames its first question as whether a denial of a motion to dismiss a criminal indictment based on the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is immediately appealable, and it describes the charged conduct as "a multi-year scheme to launder billions of dollars' worth of Iranian oil and natural gas proceeds in violation of U.S. sanctions against the Government of Iran and Iranian entities and persons."⁵³ The panel held that the denial was immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine, and that "even if we were to assume that FSIA confers immunity in the criminal context," the offense conduct charged would fall under the commercial activity exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. It affirmed.⁵³

On April 19, 2023 the Supreme Court decided the case on certiorari. The syllabus records that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act "does not provide immunity from criminal prosecution," and that on the separate common-law immunity argument the Court vacated the judgment of the court of appeals and remanded. The opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.⁵⁴

The Maxwell appeal and the non-prosecution agreement

On September 17, 2024 the court affirmed the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell in United States v. Maxwell, No. 22-1426-cr. The panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Richard C. Wesley and Raymond J. Lohier Jr. had heard argument on March 12, 2024. Andrew Rohrbach argued for the government, with Maurene Comey, Alison Moe, Lara Pomerantz and Won S. Shin on the brief for U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and Diana Fabi Samson argued for Maxwell, with Arthur L. Aidala and John M. Leventhal of Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins on the brief. Judge Cabranes wrote the opinion. It identified five questions: whether the 2007 Epstein non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida barred the New York prosecution; whether the second superseding indictment complied with the statute of limitations; whether Maxwell was entitled to a new trial over a juror issue; whether a jury note constructively amended the indictment; and whether the sentence was reasonable. The court affirmed the judgment of conviction entered by Judge Alison Nathan, who had sentenced her to concurrent terms of 60, 120 and 240 months and a fine of 250,000 dollars on each count.⁵⁵

On the first question the court held that "[a] plea agreement binds only the office of the United States Attorney for the district in which the plea is entered unless it affirmatively appears that the agreement contemplates a broader restriction." It noted that the circuits "have been split on this issue for decades." The co-conspirator clause in the agreement covered potential co-conspirators of Epstein, and the clause quoted in the opinion names Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff and Nadia Marcinkova among them. The court held that the agreement's scope was "expressly limited to the Southern District of Florida" where it was not silent, and that its terms deferred prosecution "in this District," signed under the authority of R. Alexander Acosta, then U.S. Attorney there.⁵⁶ The court observed that the operative United States Attorneys' Manual provision then barred any district from making an agreement "which purports to bind any other district(s) or division without the express written approval" of the United States Attorneys concerned or the Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division, that the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division had told the Office of Professional Responsibility that she "played no role" in the agreement, and that nothing before the court indicated the New York office had been notified of or approved it.⁵⁷ Maxwell had moved to dismiss on the ground that the agreement immunized her from prosecution on all counts as a third-party beneficiary, and the district court denied the motion. The court held that the agreement did not bind the New York office.⁵⁶

On the statute of limitations the court held that the district court "correctly denied Maxwell's motions to dismiss the charges as untimely," because 18 U.S.C. § 3283, as amended in 2003, extended the time to bring charges of sexual abuse of minors for offenses committed before its enactment, and it reviewed the denial of the motion to dismiss the indictment de novo. On the juror issue the court recorded that, after the December 29, 2021 verdict, one juror gave press interviews saying he was a survivor of child sexual abuse although he had answered "no" on three questionnaire questions on the subject, that he testified under a grant of immunity that the answers were an inadvertent mistake, and that the district court found him credible and denied a new trial. The court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion.⁵⁸

On the sentence the court upheld a four-level leadership enhancement applied to Maxwell's supervision of Sarah Kellen. The district court had relied on testimony from two of Jeffrey Epstein's pilots that Kellen was Maxwell's assistant, corroborated by testimony that Maxwell was Epstein's "number two and the lady of the house" in Palm Beach, where much of the abuse occurred.⁵⁹ Epstein's longtime pilot Larry Visoski, who flew his aircraft from 1991 to 2019, was the government's first witness at the trial in November 2021.⁶⁰

The Second Circuit denied rehearing on November 25, 2024. On October 6, 2025 the Supreme Court denied Maxwell's petition for certiorari in No. 24-1073, docketed on April 14, 2025 and linked to an application to extend the filing deadline.⁶¹

The Melzer sentence appeal, 2024

In a ruling filed in November 2024 the court affirmed the 45-year sentence of Ethan Phelan Melzer, an Army soldier, under docket 23-6247-cr.⁶²

Giuffre v. Maxwell, 2025

On July 23, 2025 a panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Reena Raggi and Myrna Pérez decided the consolidated appeals in Giuffre v. Maxwell per curiam, after submission on April 14, 2025. Giuffre and the Herald appealed from district court orders declining to unseal certain documents, and Giuffre had died on April 25, 2025 in Australia. Maxwell argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over the challenges to the December 2019 and January 2020 orders for want of a timely notice of appeal; the court concluded that those orders were not final orders and that it had jurisdiction to review all the orders challenged.⁶³

The court clarified that a judicial document's status is determined when it is filed, so that a motion to unseal does not lose that status when the case settles and the motion becomes moot. It also held that a court's failure to rely on a document does not by itself make the presumption of access "only barely cognizable," and that filings relevant to a motion to seal or unseal are themselves judicial documents. The opinion further found that, as to parts of Maxwell's own deposition concerning her sexual relationships with consenting adults, her privacy interests outweighed any presumption of public access.⁶⁴ The court vacated the December 2019 and January 2020 orders in their entirety and the November 18, 2022 oral ruling in part, and remanded "for further individual review of sealed documents and unsealing as warranted."⁶⁵ That ruling had declined to unseal parts of Giuffre's deposition testimony from a Florida action, which Alan Dershowitz had submitted in support of his motion to intervene.⁶⁵ Sigrid S. McCawley appeared for Giuffre, Adam Mueller for Maxwell, and lawyers for two anonymous amici, John Doe 183 and John Doe 133, in support of Maxwell.⁶⁶

Appeals pending in the Epstein cases

The six women who sued the Government of the United States Virgin Islands, former Governor John de Jongh, Cecile de Jongh, Governor Kenneth Mapp, Attorney General Vincent Frazer, Senators Celestino White and Carlton Dowe and Delegate Stacey Plaskett in the Southern District of New York appealed to the Second Circuit under No. 26-1316 after final judgment was entered on May 5, 2026 by Judge Arun Subramanian, who had dismissed the claims against Dowe and White on March 21, 2025 for lack of personal jurisdiction.⁶⁷

Nicholas Tartaglione, the former police officer who was Jeffrey Epstein's cellmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center when Epstein was found with a cloth around his neck on July 23, 2019, was sentenced by Judge Kenneth M. Karas on June 10, 2024 to four consecutive life terms. His appeal, No. 24-1852, was pending in May 2026.⁶⁸

A petition by the former BGC Group managing director Simon Andriesz to vacate an arbitration award, dismissed by Judge Lewis J. Liman on April 24, 2025, was appealed under No. 25-1341, which ended with the issue of the mandate on August 28, 2025.⁶⁹ After Alison Nathan's elevation to the Second Circuit, Judge Paul Engelmayer took over the Maxwell criminal case in the Southern District.⁷⁰

The judges

The judges named on this page have the following dates.⁷¹ Cabranes was commissioned to the District of Connecticut on December 10, 1979, served as its chief judge from 1992 to 1994, and was commissioned to the Second Circuit on August 10, 1994. He took senior status on March 9, 2023. Alison Nathan was commissioned to the Southern District of New York on October 17, 2011, and to the Second Circuit on March 30, 2022. Richard C. Wesley was commissioned on June 12, 2003 and took senior status on August 1, 2016. Raymond J. Lohier Jr. was commissioned on December 20, 2010. Susan L. Carney was commissioned on May 17, 2011 and took senior status on September 27, 2022. Joseph Bianco was commissioned on May 13, 2019.

Rosemary S. Pooler was commissioned to the Northern District of New York on August 10, 1994 and to the Second Circuit on June 3, 1998, took senior status on March 23, 2022, and died on August 10, 2023. Reena Raggi was commissioned to the Eastern District of New York on May 7, 1987 and to the Second Circuit on October 4, 2002. Christopher F. Droney was commissioned to the District of Connecticut on September 18, 1997 and to the Second Circuit on December 1, 2011. Gerard Lynch was commissioned to the Southern District of New York on May 25, 2000 and to the Second Circuit on September 18, 2009. Myrna Pérez was commissioned to the Second Circuit on November 12, 2021.

The earlier judges have the following dates. Learned Hand was commissioned to the Second Circuit on December 20, 1924, served as chief judge from 1948 to 1951, and died on August 18, 1961. Jerome Frank was commissioned on March 27, 1941 and died on January 13, 1957. Feinberg was commissioned to the Second Circuit on March 7, 1966, served as chief judge from 1980 to 1988, and died on July 31, 2014. Kaufman was commissioned to the Second Circuit on September 22, 1961, served as chief judge from 1973 to 1980, and took senior status on July 1, 1987. Oakes was commissioned to the Second Circuit on May 27, 1971, served as chief judge from 1989 to 1992, and died on October 13, 2007. Meskill was commissioned on April 23, 1975 and died on October 29, 2007. Lawrence W. Pierce was commissioned on November 18, 1981. John D. Mahoney was commissioned on April 7, 1986 and died on October 23, 1996. Kearse was commissioned on June 21, 1979 and took senior status on June 11, 2002. Newman was commissioned to the Second Circuit on June 21, 1979, served as chief judge from 1993 to 1997, and took senior status on July 1, 1997. Pierre N. Leval was commissioned on October 20, 1993 and took senior status on August 16, 2002.

Edelstein, the district judge in the IBM matter, was commissioned to the Southern District of New York on April 8, 1952, served as its chief judge from 1971 to 1980, and died on August 19, 2000.⁷¹